Troublesome questions these, with which Lincoln and the men of his time did not deal in the spirit of historical science.  Their wishes fathered their thoughts.  Southerners, practically without exception, held the theory of the disintegration of the Crown’s prerogative, its distribution among the States.  The great leaders of Northern thought repudiated the idea.  Webster and Clay would have none of it.  But their own theories were not always consistent; and they differed among themselves.  Lincoln did the natural thing.  He fastened upon the tendencies in Northern thought that supported his own faith.  Chief among these was the idea that sovereignty passed to the general congregation of the inhabitants of the colonies—­“we, the people”—­because we, the people, were the real power that supported the revolt.  He had accepted the idea that the American Revolution was an uprising of the people, that its victory was in a transfer of sovereign rights from an English Crown to an American nation; that a new collective state, the Union, was created by this nation as the first act of the struggle, and that it was to the Union that the Crown succumbed, to the Union that its prerogative passed.  To put this idea in its boldest and its simplest terms was the crowning effort of the message.

“The States have their status in the Union and they have no other legal status.  If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution.  The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty.  By conquest or purchase, the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has.  The Union is older than any of the States, and in fact, it created them as States.  Originally some dependent colonies made the Union, and in turn, the Union threw off this old dependence for them and made them States, such as they are."(9)

This first message completes the evolution of Lincoln as a political thinker.  It is his third, his last great landmark.  The Peoria speech, which drew to a focus all the implications of his early life, laid the basis of his political significance; the Cooper Union speech, summing up his conflict with Douglas, applied his thinking to the new issue precipitated by John Brown; but in both these he was still predominantly a negative thinker, still the voice of an opposition.  With the first message, he became creative; he drew together what was latent in his earlier thought; he discarded the negative; he laid the foundation of all his subsequent policy.  The breadth and depth of his thinking is revealed by the fulness with which the message develops the implications of his theory.  In so doing, he anticipated the main issues that were to follow:  his determination to keep nationalism from being narrowed into mere “Northernism”; his effort to create an all-parties government; his stubborn insistence that he was suppressing an insurrection, not waging external war; his doctrine that the Executive,